


People Like Us

by livenudebigfoot



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Afterlife, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Fade to Black, Irrelevant Gift Exchange, Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-04
Updated: 2014-01-04
Packaged: 2018-01-07 09:30:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1118291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/livenudebigfoot/pseuds/livenudebigfoot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Donnelly watches Carter. Carter watches Donnelly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	People Like Us

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pkmndaisuki](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pkmndaisuki/gifts).



> Written as part of the 2013 Irrelevant Gift Exchange! Merry Extremely Late Christmas, pkmndaisuki! Hope you like it!

He watches her.

There are so many people carefully, deliberately situated between him and her, hats and heights and strange angles. Donnelly’s an unpracticed shadow; he’s spent too long behind desks and on the wrong sides of evidence boards. Carter, by contrast, is sharp from the field, with sight that drifts too often to the corners of her eyes.

He gives her more distance than he would for anyone else, a buffer. A thin cloud of privacy.

He keeps tabs on her by the wink of streetlights on her hair. He follows her all the way home.

He installs himself in a doorway across the street, jams his hands in his pockets and wishes he’d brought a hat. He hates to be here, he really does hate it.

Because, he reflects as he cranes his neck to watch her sail past the window rolling her shoulders and stretching her arms far above her head so her leather jacket bunches and crinkles and rides up around her belly, he trusts her.

Or, he nearly does.

The problem of The Man in the Suit looked like such a simple thing before it became his problem in any meaningful way. Some overqualified hired gun living off the grid in New York City, following his own secret agenda. A tempest in a teapot. A problem easily solved, given enough time and enough rope. Of course, the second he took a closer look, the problem shifted and rolled and expanded until it was something else altogether.

Before it was his problem, it was hers. This was reassuring to him. Someone else has tackled this problem; someone else is turning it over and over alongside him, and he is not alone in this. Donnelly knows his own idiosyncrasies, how he slips sometimes, becomes just a little too obsessed until suddenly the whole wide world is narrowed down to the pinprick of his problem and he’s missing everything.

That’s how you ruin relationships, he reflects as he watches Carter hang her jacket on a tall coat rack, a heavy, golden, antique thing that doesn’t seem to suit her sensibilities. That’s how you convince people to drift away from you. That’s how you wind up with a one-bedroom apartment in Richmond, secure in the knowledge that you can’t even keep a cat because you aren’t home enough to take care of it.

Before tonight, he thought she might be the same, but as he watches her cross windows to a small kitchen and plant a tired kiss on the head of her son where he leans over homework on the table, Donnelly knows it’s not true. She can detach, or she could at one time, and Donnelly never could.

He hates to be watching her here while her thoughts are so far from work and the Man in the Suit. It seems like the worst kind of betrayal. But betrayal, he guesses, begets betrayal, and there’s a leak in Donnelly’s tightly-sealed team. His every operation has failed and while Donnelly doesn’t exactly think he’s infallible, can accept a few mistakes, reminds himself, incessantly, in a voice that is nearly his, “Nick, everybody makes mistakes. No matter how good you are, you are always going to make mistakes. Just learn from it and keep going. Don’t wallow,” after a certain point, you have to start wondering if somebody’s just fucking you over.

And Carter, he hates to admit, is a common element. He’s valued her, he’s kept her close. Before it was his problem, it was hers.

And she couldn’t solve it.

He hates that his hunt for a traitor has led him to this doorway across from this apartment. It’s not as though Donnelly hasn’t seen more suspicious faces around the precinct. He’s arrested his share of HR flunkies and he’s only been in town a few short months. The NYPD is full of crooked cops and Carter’s a part of it, no matter how much he likes her.

She shouldn’t be here, he thinks as she leaves the kitchen, crosses out of sight and then into another window. She’s sharp and she’s driven. She’s like him. She belongs at the FBI.

It’s her bedroom window, he realizes belatedly, and his eyes drop bashful to the sidewalk as she grabs her shirt by the collar and drags up and over her head, exposing a thin, dark sliver of her back. She takes her shirt off like a man, he thinks as he stares at his own shoes. That’s funny.

Maybe, he muses, picking up his thought from earlier with a kind of feverish diligence, it’s because she’s so sharp and so driven that she feels she has to stay here.

When he lets himself look up again, she’s shuffling around the living room in a loose sweatshirt, Villanova blue emblazoned across the chest. She didn’t attend, he knows. Maybe a boyfriend’s. Maybe she just likes college basketball. He could ask, if they ever found themselves talking about anything but work. Unlikely.

Her phone is tapped, but she only calls for Thai food and he’s pretty sure she’s not talking to the delivery guy in code. He watches Carter and her son (the name Taylor leaps like a fish out of the lightly troubled pond of Donnelly’s memory) eat Thai food and chat in a happy, yellow rectangle of light until he feels so sick and guilty that he has to leave.

By the next day, the tap on her phone is gone. It should never, Donnelly thinks, have been there in the first place. He rubs hard at his eyes and tries not to look stricken when she comes up behind him in the morning, grips the back of his chair and leans, propelling him a few inches forward into his desk. She cranes over his shoulder, so the tip of her nose and a few wayward strands of glossy hair extend into the corner of his line of sight.

“Anything new?” she asks. Her voice puffs warm past his ear.

  

* * *

 

 

She watches him.

In her mind’s eye, though, she can still see Finch’s failed straight face, the smug poke of his tongue at the corner of his mouth, when she asked for his help with this. Not that she’s inexperienced with shadowing, but she’s always been an interrogator first and foremost, and she’s proud of it. Riddled with trickery as it is, there’s at least something straightforward about an interrogation.

Finch was all nods and smiles and “Yes, of course, Detective”s as he procured a tap on Donnelly’s phone and a camera with a lens like a sniper scope and a hotel room right across from Donnelly’s (“Like the two arms of a horseshoe,” he explained, making the shape with his hands.). He dropped the paper bag with the camera inside in her lap with a smarmy, “Enjoy, Detective.” It couldn’t be more obvious that he was choking down mocking protestations (“Oh, no, I couldn’t possibly. That would be unethical!”) if he was actively biting his own tongue.

She crumpled the mouth of the bag and thanked him tersely.

Now she’s lying in the dark, stretched flat on her belly across the hotel bed and squinting down the lens toward Donnelly. Through the camera, he might as well be ten feet away. If she shut her eyes, she could listen to the earpiece and it’d be just as if he was in the room with her.

He’s not loud. Mostly, he rustles paper.

Most people would have switched to a tablet or something by now but she guesses Donnelly’s like her in that way, tactile. He likes to be able to fold and tear and cut and underline his evidence. He uses a black, soft-tipped marker that he keeps tucked behind his ear. There are smudges on his fingertips, at the edge of his slightly receding hairline from where he keeps shoving his hand into his own hair like he’s trying to drag a difficult thought out through his skull, across one cheekbone like a shadow or a bruise. When he’s thinking, he bites down on the end with his back molars. Not gnawing, just one solid, decisive click.

It’s more fidgeting than she’s ever seen him do. She always thought that there was something unbending and mechanical in his posture, in the overthought perfection of his stance. Like maybe he only moves at certain joints, like a plastic Action man. It’s strange to see him sitting cross-legged on the bed, his spine a gentle slope. Bizarre to see him biting his nails and brushing his thin hair out of place in the same direction over and over until it’s almost windswept. He’s wearing flannel pajama pants bunched up incidentally around his knees, exposing pale shins.

No shirt. That’s something she’s been trying kind of hard to ignore. Not that he’s bad to look at, because he isn’t. It’s only that she can’t. There’s part of her that’s still convinced he wears a tie to bed.

As it is, she thinks she may like him a lot. It’s been easy to pretend that he’s an enemy while she’s having to thwart his every move, while he’s a damn pest to the mission she’s sharing with those two weirdoes in suits. But of course, he’s a smart guy. And he’s honest. She’s had too little of that lately. For all that she truly believes they’re the good guys, Reese and Finch are anything but open books. And for all that she’s warming to Fusco, his backbone and good humor, he’s a mess of lies and she knows it. Donnelly’s on the side of the angels. He’s got a set of rules in his head, he’s got passion and dedication and he cares about doing things the right way, the clean way. She used to care so much about that. What happened there?

Reese, obviously, but _what happened?_

Well, she still does. She’ll always care, at least a little. She’s just had to shelve it for a while, like her winter clothes. She’ll come back to those principles one day, when they’re good for something, but they’re useless in the climate she’s in right now. She regards Donnelly’s forthrightness with a kind of nostalgia, as though it’s a photo from a recent Christmas. Remember when we were like that? That was wonderful. This is what makes it impossible for her to not like Donnelly, even while he’s making it his life’s mission to take Reese down. And she’s not deluded or anything. If Reese goes down, Carter goes down, in one way or another. Either some scrap of evidence Donnelly finds on Reese will lead straight back to her or she’ll look at a world without Reese and start itching and the itch will build up to something brave and dangerous.

Still, she likes Donnelly. Sometimes, when he’s hot on the trail and his big, soft hound dog’s eyes start to light up a little with single-minded _chase_ , she’ll forget herself and root for him a little. Root for him, and then screw him over. She hates that her relationship with Donnelly will always have this hanging over it.

She thinks if Reese never came along and ruined her life, she’d like to work with someone like Donnelly.

In darker, quieter reaches of the night, she thinks about being an FBI agent. It was never her dream. If the world hadn’t become so goddamn rotten while her back was turned, she would’ve been happy being a cop forever. Now, the FBI looks like a way to get out from under the yoke and away from the petty, dime store corruption of the NYPD. Not that’d be a real escape. Carter knows from experience that corruption doesn’t have a homeland; it lives everywhere. But at least she’d be working with someone cautious and straightforward, with clear rules and a clear conscience.

Someone like Donnelly.

Yes.

She’s getting better at focusing the lens the way she needs it. At this resolution, she can just count the knobs of his vertebrae where they stick out on his pale, hawk-muscled back. She aims over his shoulder when he holds a sheet of paper to the light, captures that image with all the heartless ease of a machine. On the camera’s tiny display screen, the paper looks like nothing. On a huge, high-definition computer monitor, it will prove to be somebody’s phone record. Not hers.

A relief. He’s not investigating her anymore.

On the huge, high-definition computer monitor, she’ll be suddenly unable to tear her eyes away from the sharp, dark ridge of his shoulder blade as he holds the paper up to the light.

That doesn’t mean anything, but she’s worried about it all the same.

Finch asks her later, how it went, and she asks if he can’t get her that room on the other end of the horseshoe more or less indefinitely.

“It’s guilty work, Detective,” he says.

“Yeah, well…” She breathes hard through her nose. “He lost his right to privacy when he followed me home.”

Finch clears his throat. “Has he been back?”

“No.”

“Would you like us to ensure he won’t be?”

“No.”

Unsettling as it was to make him that night when he trailed her through the streets, she doesn’t hold any of it against him. It’s hard to trust anybody these days.

So when she meets him again it’s in the precinct and her conscience is clean as ice. She finds herself lingering at his shoulder again, leaning on him. Beneath the cheap blue fabric of his suit, she can feel the sharp edge of his shoulder and she risks squeezing hard.

He smells like a well-loved book, clean and papery and worn down soft.

 

* * *

 

 

They watch each other, squinting over the thick glass rims of their drinks.

It’s a funny little edge that they’re balanced on because this will only become a confrontation if one of them makes it so. If one of them looks away and writes it off as incidental eye contact, or if one of them greets the other and they endure a minute’s worth of inane small talk before breaking away, they can save themselves a world of hurt.

Carter doesn’t come out to the bar after work often. Her friends, for the most part, are not her coworkers, and based on what she’s learned about her coworkers in the past few months, she doesn’t want their friendship. She knows the cost of HR’s loyalty too well.

Coworker and friend overlaps for her in Fusco, so when she goes to the bar, it’s with him. But what she’s discovered about Fusco in the bar is that it’s not about socialization. Not quite. He’s running some other game, one that’s played by teasing smiles out of awful people, so even if he’s there with her, he isn’t really. He’s talking and he’s laughing and he’s being a friend but there’s a tightness behind his eyes. A calculation. He’s bad company. Or, more accurately, he’s fantastic company, but it’s all calculated.

So, yeah, she doesn’t go out to the bar often. But she goes enough to know that Donnelly goes even less. He’s stiff, straightbacked, and utterly alone, tacked awkwardly to the end of the bar by his elbow. He divides his attention neatly between his beer, lingering scans of the room, and furtive, flicking glances at Carter.

Meanwhile, Donnelly’s just considering that line his loafers are toeing. Because he’s got all the respect in the world for her and he knows she’s tough, smart, honest, formidable, all of that, but he knows there’s a power gap here where their jobs are concerned. At least for now. If she takes him up on his offer to join the FBI then, maybe…

Well, it’s still inappropriate, because then she’d be a coworker or a partner or – hell, she’s smart, it could happen – a boss.

Better to look outside your profession for that, he thinks. Somebody whose offer of partnership you won’t mistake for anything else.

Somebody you’ve never _spied on_ , maybe. Come on, Nick.

He takes a long draft of his beer, gets ever so slightly lost in the thin patina of foam floating on the top, admonishes himself silently for being a complete lightweight. When her hand slips into the crook of his arm he jumps and the beer sloshes amber and bright over his wrist. She leaps out of the path of the wave.

Blinking, she says, “Sorry, I didn’t mean to surprise you.” She shakes her hand once, sharp and efficient, scattering droplets, and then she runs it absently through her hair.

“It’s, ah, no problem. I was just…”

“In another world?”

His lips twitch into a cautious smile. “Something like that.”

Her boot (short, low-heeled, ankle-height, efficient) slides through the puddle his beer left behind and she leans on the bar like his mirror. “You doing okay?”

She means it. She’s been watching him for a while now and it doesn’t matter how straight he holds himself when he’s at work. Back in his hotel room, the slope of his shoulders is more pronounced, more worrisome. He is pale and eats little. The last few times she watched his room, she didn’t catch him sleeping.

Which doesn’t mean anything, necessarily. The last few times she watched his room, she stayed the night. Not on purpose, it’s just that between the low lights and the soft bed and the quiet shifting sounds of Donnelly at the other end of the horseshoe, it was tough to stay awake. She jolted into consciousness at dawn with a crick in her back and a camera pressed into her cheek.

He was awake then, too. He paced.

“I’m doing well,” he lies. “Everyone’s been very helpful.”

She can’t quite stifle her laugh.

“Well,” he amends. “ _You_ have.”

That’s not exactly less funny. “I’m happy to,” she says. “I’m sorry for how…difficult it can be here, sometimes. To get anything done. The NYPD is a pretty fast machine when it wants to be but there are a lot of monkey wrenches in the works and it takes time to root them out.”

“I know it,” he says. His last small victory was the arrest of several prominent members of HR and he likes to remind himself of that when he starts to feel that he’s done nothing in this city. “That’s why I appreciate the work you do, Carter. This has been your case from the very beginning and you’ve handled it with astounding intelligence and dedication. It’s been an honor and a pleasure to work with you. Truly. I hope that you’ll take my offer to join the Bureau seriously, but I have to admit that if you do, the NYPD will lose one of its finest detectives.”

Her gaze drops to her shoes and she hopes it looks like she’s just humbled, crippled by the onslaught of compliments instead of blazingly guilty because he’s a decent guy and she’s betraying him. She fixes her expression, expertly folds it into a sly smile. “Is this your way of asking if I accept that offer, Agent Donnelly?”

“Well, if you’ve, uh, reached a decision…”

“I haven’t,” she says. His solemn eyes get almost imperceptibly sadder, so she smiles at him. “It’s nothing I ever thought about for myself,” she says, “but it seems right, you know? Like a good direction for my life to be heading in. I love this city, but with the way things are…I don’t want to stay here forever. I don’t see a happy ending here. I’ll, um…” She hides her mouth with her fingertips for a moment. “I’ll get back to you. When the Man in the Suit thing is done. Then I’ll know.”

“I understand,” he says. “You’d be uprooting your life. That’s not an easy call to make.”

“What about you?” she asks and when his stare remains blank and slightly on-edge, she adds, “Where are your roots?”

His laugh is dry. “Not here.” _No roots but you and him_ , he thinks. “Home is in Virginia.”

“Family?”

“Yup.”

“Girlfriend?”

He hesitates.

She presses on sheepishly. “I noticed you didn’t have a ring.”

“No,” he says. And then, in odd, confessional tones, he adds, “To be honest, I’m more or less married to my job.”

“I get that,” she says. And she does, even as someone who once was married to somebody. It’s a difficult split to navigate. She might never have made that split herself, if she hadn’t loved Paul so much and if getting pregnant hadn’t pushed her down that path. She could never do it again, she thinks, now that her son is growing up and her marriage is dead in the ground.

Sometimes she thinks of her son and she feels distant and negligent. Like all of her cases are standing between them.

“You ever think of taking a few steps back? Not that I think you should,” she adds, interrupting the furrow of his brows. “You’re good at what you do because you’re dedicated.  Don’t apologize for it. I’m just thinking that it might, ah, be good for you. To get away.”

“What, you mean a vacation?”

“Yeah, sure. Something like that. Why not?”

“Too much work to do,” he points out. “I can’t pack up and leave in the middle of an investigation; I’d lose focus. You know better than anybody how absorbing this case is. I don’t see you taking a vacation.”

She remembers those first few months, when the guy in the suit was a mysterious entity on the edge of her radar, when she was chasing shadows. She couldn’t have walked away either. Not then.

Not even now, she worries sometimes.

“No,” she admits. “I couldn’t have.”

“After this case,” he says, in bright but doubtful tones. “When the Man in the Suit thing is done.”

She knocks the toe of her boot lightly against his shin. “What, and miss my first day at the Bureau?”

“Well. When you put it like that, maybe I’d better hold off.”

“Take the vacation, Donnelly.” She’s not here, not exactly. She’s back in that darkened hotel room, watching him through a lens and listening. He’s mostly so quiet, but sometimes he talks to himself. Not in a crazy way, just in the way that busy, absent-minded people do. Barely-voiced affirmations and negations as he reads, underlines, scribbles notes. It worries her, but another part of her wishes he spoke more, if only because his voice is low and pleasant and curls in the bottom of her belly. “It’d be good for you.”

He shrugs, and it’s a loose kind of gesture, for him. Like he’s given up. “Probably,” he admits. “I’d like to, in theory.”

“In practice?”

“I’d _hate_ it.” He laughs after he says it and the sound seems to surprise him. “God, I could never stand it. I think there’s a predisposition in people like us to never be happy. Not at rest. I go home on my day off and all I can think about is the work I should be doing, how much time I’m wasting, how much worse it’s going to get because I’m doing nothing. And I know I need to recharge, but I can’t help but think that the work I do is more important than me.” He sighs, tilts toward the bar until both elbows are braced there and he’s looking away. “’People like us.’ I’m sorry, that was a deductive leap.”

“Don’t worry about it.” She reaches out, pats his arm around where his elbow bends and fills out into a bicep. “You’re actually pretty on the nose.”

He raises an eyebrow.

She braces herself beside him, so their shoulders knock. “I got shot last year.” She folds and twists her hands together on the bar in front of her. “CI turned on me. Got two rounds off into my chest. Everyone tells me, take some time off. Recover a while. But I was wearing a vest at the time. There was just some bruising, a cracked rib. It wasn’t so bad. That’s what I told people anyway, but I think the real reason was that the idea of going home and sitting around after that made me sick.”

She doesn’t look to him for a response and he doesn’t make one, not in words. He hums, low and understanding, and she can feel it rattle in her breastbone.

“I’ve got a son,” she says, helplessly chattering on. “He’s a great kid, an amazing kid. Means everything to me. He’s the only thing I’ve got going on outside of work and I barely have time for him.”

Donnelly clears his throat. “This is the first time I’ve been in a bar for reasons unrelated to an investigation in maybe five months.”

“One month for me,” she says. “But when I don’t go, I drink alone, which is probably worse.”

“I don’t even drink,” he confesses, knocking the bottom of his beer against the bar.

“What are you _doing here_?”

“I don’t know.” He’s looking up like he expects to find the answer on the ceiling. His eyes are very bright. “I do not know.”

“You know,” she says, letting herself lean, “if it isn’t really your kind of place, why don’t we get out of here?”

He hesitates. “I wouldn’t want to take you away from your company.”

She peeks back over her shoulder. Fusco is telling that anecdote of his about the dumbass who went out robbing convenience stores after work and forgot to take his nametag off. It’s a good story and Fusco tells it well. His eyes are laughing. There’s a tightness in his jaw.

“He won’t even know I’m gone,” she says.

So the two of them bundle up, jackets and scarves, and they slip out into the night. They don’t have to make excuses. No one tries to stop them.

They find no particular direction. Donnelly only suggests that they find a cab, though neither of them seem to have any idea where they’d go in one. So they walk along the street, squinting for a cab to somewhere, and as they walk they let their shoulders brush together, stiff and numbed beneath their jackets. The brush becomes a solid, friendly knock, the knock becomes a lingering touch, until finally they stop bothering to separate. Their shoulders shift and overlap until they might as well have their arms around each other.

Might as well, but of course they don’t.

Donnelly flags down the first cab they see with a curt wave, and when it ambles to a stop beside them, he opens up the door for her and stands aside like an anachronism. She passes him by, turns as she sits so she’s perched there on the end of the seat with her legs hanging out the door, soles of her boots scuffing the sidewalk.

He bows his head low, grips the top of the car to keep his balance. “I don’t know where you want to go,” he says. There’s something painful and sheepish in the set of his face. Like he’s about to give something up.

“Donnelly.” She sighs. “What’d you come out here for? Really?”

He divests his other hand from his pocket and swipes it up and down the side of his face. “Maybe,” he says, “I wanted to try having a vacation. Just a small one. To see how it goes. Or maybe I just wanted an excuse to talk to you about something other than work.”

“Agent, if you were trying to get away from talking about work, you didn’t do so well.”

He smiles. His smiles are rare and they have a raw newness to them. “I guess not.”

Carter can see the tension in his arms and shoulders, where he’s planning to push off the cab, spring back and let her go home alone. She doesn’t want that, she decides suddenly. She can’t go home at all tonight. She thinks if she does, she’ll be forced to face something she doesn’t even want to look at. She winds her arms around his neck, tangles him tight until he’s teetering, falling into the cab and into her lap and into her lips where she catches and traps and bites him.

She falls back with a grunt and he follows after, diligent and acquiescent, army-crawling on elbows so he’s draped over her and their feet are poking uselessly out the open door. The sounds he makes as he kisses her back are low, dark, and serious but they come up at the end, a questioning little tail.

All at once it’s pull and push and her shoulders are squashed up against the side of the car and he’s disentangling himself and Carter’s thinking she’s got to grab at him, she’s got to pull him back before he gives up everything, but he’s just pulling their feet inside the cab before he slams the door.

She props herself up on one elbow against slick faux-leather seats and pushes a handful of mussed hair out of her eyes so she can see him properly, with his hair pushed forward and his lips all used. “Your place,” she says.

He rattles off the address breathlessly as he wrestles off his coat with shaking hands.

She helps.

In Donnelly’s hotel room, she finds that it is easier to speak to him if they don’t really try to have a conversation, if she can trace wobbling red lines down the bumps of his spine, push her face into his hair, his face against her breastbone, and convince him to talk to her senselessly. This way, she can distract herself from the lies she’s not precisely telling him. She doesn’t have to think about what happens when the Man in the Suit thing is done with. She doesn’t have to think at all.

After, when he’s half asleep with his head pillowed on her hipbone, she looks out the hotel window and picks out the blank, darkened square of glass that she knows must be her own room at the other end of the horseshoe. For a moment, she is in two places. She’s here, in Donnelly’s bed, and she’s there, in an identical bed elsewhere in the hotel, watching and cataloguing and judging.

If she looks hard enough, she thinks she can make out the wink of her camera’s lens.

 

* * *

 

 

He watches her in the rearview mirror of his car, and he wants to believe she’s someone else. It’s preferable right now to believe that his partner, his almost-friend has been replaced with a convincing imposter than that it’s really her in the backseat in handcuffs next to the man he thought they were hunting together.

He thought that they were a team, that she was the brains and he was the backbone, and that together they were going to bring an end to all of this. And then…

And then.

The man in the suit stares blankly out the window on one side and she stares out the window on the other, but they are a united front, utterly silent.

Suddenly she’s looking at him, her eyes on his in the mirror, her lips parted like she has something she wants to say, like she could ever say anything that could help him make sense of this. And as he’s trying to swallow down the betrayal, the rage rising in his throat, all he can think about is her lips. How he kissed them, how she kissed him back and it was a lie.

Bet she was thinking of him, says some treacherous voice in the back of his head that doesn’t sound like him. Bet that all the time she was with you her mind was on the Man in the Suit. It would have to be, because she cared enough for that goddamn criminal to give up everything that was good about herself.

The phone in his pocket warbles, and the sound is unbearable. He scrapes at it with his fingernails, jams it hard against his ear, barely hears what the person on the other side is saying.

Carter’s gazing at him, sad-eyed. If there’s an apology in her eyes, he doesn’t want it.

There are headlights coming on from the side and they are so bright.

 

* * *

 

 

She watches him and it seems to be at a distance. Lying on the car’s ceiling with the seatbelt cutting into her shoulder and glass all in her clothes and hair, everything seems still and miniaturized. Between the seats she can see him, crumpled. If she moves her head, which makes her dizzy, she can see the spreading pool of blood crowning his skull on the asphalt. She tries not to move her head.

He seems smaller, somehow. Thin and scrawny and so, so pale. She could pick him up, she thinks, if she could move. Just scoop him up like a bundle of laundry and carry him away from this awful place.

It’s impossible to imagine, now, that he was tall, that his voice was so unexpectedly beautiful, that he never smiled until he did and you felt as though you’d moved mountains. That he could be funny, if only through the absence of humor. That his eyes were so damn sad.

He can’t be any of those, now. He’s just a thing. Something broken and carelessly scattered.

Carter thinks she hated him, in those moments before the end. Hated him because he was right and she was right and everyone was wrong. Because she was terrified that Donnelly was going to ruin her and terrified that she’d done something to deserve it.

If she hated him then, she doesn’t hate him now. She can’t.

She tears her gaze away, looks instead at the empty seat where John Reese used to be.

She leaves them behind, Reese and Donnelly both. What else can she do? She goes home, she changes, she patches up her wounds, she lets Fusco be the one to erase her from the scene of the crime and she chokes back an admonishment and a word of thanks.

She makes herself think about finding John Reese but every now and again she’ll pull a tiny, jewel-bright chip of glass out of her hair and she’s right back in that car, watching Donnelly’s life creep across the dirty street like spilled milk.

 

* * *

 

 

When they meet in the ghost of New York City, Carter isn’t watching Donnelly and Donnelly isn’t watching Carter. They just settle beside each other on the memory of a park bench.

“I thought you didn’t like it in the city,” she says, finally.

“I don’t,” he replies. “I never did. But I, ah, I got attached. Put down roots. Occupational hazard, I guess.” They pause, and it’s very, very quiet. It usually is, around here. “I was hoping I wouldn’t see you here for a while,” he says.

“Yeah.” She sighs. “Me too. I kinda had plans.”

Petulantly, he says, “I did too.”

“I’m sorry, Donnelly.”

He shrugs. “Don’t be. It wasn’t your fault.”

“Yeah, I know. I’m just…sorry.” She props her elbows on her knees, bends double. “I’m not sorry I lied to you,” she adds. “Just in case you were wondering.”

“Alright.” His intonation is stiff and she’s not sure whether he’s past caring in a friendly, forgive-and-forget kind of way or if there’s nothing she can do to make him smile at her again.

“There was a lot going on that you didn’t know about. You didn’t understand, and I couldn’t explain it to you because you wouldn’t have even tried to understand,” she says. “And what I was doing that whole time we worked together wasn’t…legal. It wasn’t right in the way that you’d define it. But it was the right thing for me, and that’s what I need you to understand. I…” she tries to speak, scoffs, continues, “I spent almost my whole life following the rules, and again and again I saw the system screw the people it was supposed to protect. In those last few years, I broke a lifetime’s worth of laws.” She trails off with a faint, sheepish grin. “But I saved so many people, Donnelly. Just…not you.”

“Hmm.” He blinks. His eyes are locked on some distant gray horizon.

She looks at her hands, winds her fingers together. “You hate me for what happened?” she asks.

 “No.” He sounds a little surprised when he says it. “The good thing about being here is that it gives you some psychological distance from things that happened in that other place. I can’t really be upset about anything anymore.”

“If you could be upset,” she says, “would you be?”

He nods once, very slowly. “Almost definitely,” he says, brightly. “But I can also admit that towards the end there, I was, arguably, less than just.”

“You put him out in the prison yard and let them tear him apart.”

“And I was right. Which,” he continues, “is not the same as being ethically right. But I don’t exactly feel guilty.”

“ _Can_ you feel guilty?”

“Most likely not. I haven’t really tried.” He clears his throat, suddenly. “So, what happened to you?”

She heaves a long, ashy breath. It might have been her last. “Right before, I got half the Russian mob and the last scraps of HR all in one place and had the FBI take them down. Made a few enemies along the way.”

“And you did this, I’m sure, with proper legal backing.”

She makes a low, thoughtful sound. “What’s your stance on grenade launchers?”

He takes a very sharp breath.

“It didn’t happen until a few days later, though.” She sighs. “I don’t know. Everything was going so well. I just forgot about the guy who took me out. It’s stupid, isn’t it? The stuff you miss.”

He nods. “I know the feeling.”

She aims a light punch at his upper arm. “Yeah, OK. We’re both dead, you wanna maybe get over it?”

His frown deepens, but she thinks it may be only to mask a smile. “I’m working on it.”

She tilts, leans against his arm, rests her cheek against his shoulder. “Nick, it’s just bad out there. It’s a shitty world for people like us.”

He doesn’t say anything. He just lets his own head tilt against hers lazily, and they stay that way, leaning on one another, watching the horizon.

After a while, they’re not watching anything at all.


End file.
